Education Quote by Francis Atterbury

“Affliction” is doing double duty here: it’s both a personal calamity and a public instrument. Atterbury, an Anglican bishop who moved in the same air as ministers and monarchs, writes like a man who has seen how quickly comfort curdles into entitlement. Calling suffering “a school of virtue” isn’t sentimental; it’s disciplinary. Virtue, in this framing, isn’t discovered through self-expression but drilled into the body by circumstance. Pain becomes pedagogy.

The second clause tightens the screw. “Levity” signals more than lightheartedness; it’s moral unseriousness, the breezy confidence that life will keep underwriting your appetites. Affliction “corrects” it the way a scandal corrects a career: abruptly, humiliatingly, and with consequences that can’t be spun away. Then comes the most political line of all: it “interrupts the confidence of sinning.” Sin here isn’t just private vice; it’s the arrogance of believing you can transgress without cost because your position cushions you. That’s the psychology of court culture, patronage networks, and power insulated from accountability.

Subtext: Atterbury is selling a theologically respectable version of what statesmen have always known - fear and loss are better governors than ideals. In an era of faction, religious tension, and fragile legitimacy, “affliction” reads like both warning and consolation. If you’re suffering, it can be redeemed as moral training. If you’re coasting, it’s a reminder that history has a way of auditing the overconfident.